Work on happiness first

The Life: Shock, horror. Money is the key motivator for senior executives in the Middle East, says a new survey.

Scott Kaufman, the chief executive of Humantelligence, left, Panos Manolopoulos, the vice-chairman regions of Stanton Chase International, centre, and Yiannis Lagos, the president for international markets at Humantelligence. Rich-Joseph Facun / The NationalShow less

The old adage goes that hard work leads to success, which ultimately provides us with happiness.

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But one behavioural science company now wants to turn this theory on its head.

According to Humantelligence, a US company that recently conducted its first survey in the Middle East, happiness comes first. If staff are happy then they are more likely to be successful and work harder.

Of course, trying to find out what makes staff happy at work is a difficult job because what pleases one person may upset another. So Humantelligence has developed a survey tool called TalentScan to determine what drives staff.

In partnership with the executive search consultant Stanton Chase International, the company recently questioned senior executives at 350 companies in the region. Up to 15 senior executives out of a total of more than 3,000 from the sample of companies were surveyed using TalentScan.

The results of the survey, released in Dubai this week, were broken down into four key areas: motivators; workplace behaviour; the ideal workplace environment; and life priorities.

In a region where many people work to build a nest egg, it will come as little surprise that wealth was the number one motivator. "You might say this is not new," says Yiannis Lagos, the president for international markets at Humantelligence. "But it is new for us because it is the first region in the world we have seen this. There is no other region where money is the key motivator."

Human Intelligence concludes that a money-driven person can often be beneficial to a company because they will focus on sales and the bottom line. But they can also lose touch with the people they are overseeing and become workaholics, which might impede on their lifestyle and therefore their happiness.

The survey was conducted right across the Middle East, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. It found that many senior executives in the region prefer working alone rather than in teams, that their working environment had to be fast-paced, and that they were often rapidly decisive in decision-making instead of pondering a problem.

According to the TalentScan survey, senior executives in the Middle East are also motivated by helping people, which Mr Lagos says can often contradict the idea of wealth as a motivator.

Geoff Cripps, the group director of human resources at Global Process Systems, part of the Al Jaber Group, believes gauging how to make staff happy and then using that to ensure they work harder is an interesting concept.

"I think there are whole countries that run on a happiness formula, for example the Dalai Lama in Nepal," Mr Cripps says. "But I'm not sure that actual happiness has been measured at this stage [by the survey], I haven't yet seen how they ensure happiness."

Mr Cripps says he would like to see more information on the different types of expatriates and local populations within each country. "We need to see a breakdown of people, because our Emirati friends are going to feel very different to someone from the UK or Australia," he says.

At the launch of the survey, a number of HR directors, who provided senior executives from their firms as guinea pigs, believed Humantelligence was also confusing happiness with finding the right person for a role.

"If you align your own values with what an organisation wants to do, then clearly you are more productive," said an HR director at a large government entity. "Happiness is a nice thing to think about but I'm not sure it is driving production."